Description:
""Building a Better Race" powerfully demonstrates the centrality of eugenics during the first half of the twentieth century. Kline persuasively uncovers eugenics' unexpected centrality to modern assumptions about marriage, the family, and morality, even as late as the 1950s. The book is full of surprising connections and stories, and provides crucial new perspectives illuminating the history of eugenics, gender and normative twentieth-century sexuality."--Gail Bederman, author of "Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the US, 1880-1917"
"A strikingly fresh approach to eugenics.... Kline's work places eugenicists squarely at the center of modern reevaluations of females sexuality, sexual morality in general, changing gender roles, and modernizing family ideology. She insists that eugenic ideas had more power and were less marginal in public discourse than other historians have indicated."--Regina Morantz-Sanchez, author of "Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn"
Review Quotes: "Concise and provocative.... Kline demonstrates how eugenicists refurbished Victorian morality, transforming it into a selfconsciously modern notion of ‘ reproductive morality.'... Kline also establishes the continuity between early, racist eugenic ideas and the pronatalist rhetoric that survives today--further debunking the myth that American eugenics died after the revelations of the Nazi Holocaust.... This is an important book for historians of science, medicine, race, gender, and public policy."--"Journal of American History"